The Shame Machine with Cathy O'Neil
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What is the premise of Cathy O'Neil’s book *The Shame Machine*?
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You're listening to the Noctrinist Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman. As you may know, the Nocturnist team has been working on an audio documentary series on the theme of shame and medicine over the last couple of years. Throughout the creative process, I've learned so much about the emotion of shame from our two shame experts, Dr. Aluna Dulazal, who's a philosopher at the University of Exeter. And Dr. Will Bynum, who's a physician based at Duke, who studies shame experiences in medical learners. But today's guest helped me understand shame in a totally new way. How does it manifest in a larger scale in society? Her name's Kathy O'Neill, and she earned her PhD in math from Harvard and worked as a math professor at Barnard College before switching over to the private sector, working as a quant for the hedge fund DESHA and a data scientist.
scientists in the New York startup scene. She's a regular contributor to Bloomberg Opinion, and in 2016 wrote the book Weapons of Math Destruction, How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. She's the CEO of Orca, an algorithmic auditing company, and a member of the Public Interest Tech Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her new book, The Shame Machine, Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation, came out in March of 2022. This was an awesome conversation in which Kathy and I get into a bit of her personal history with shame related to weight and body type, and then talk about some really helpful frameworks for how to think about shame. When is shame appropriate? When is it inappropriate?
How does shame work? And when does shame work? When does shame not work? How do we recognize and manage that impulse we have inside of ourselves to shame others? That feeling of satisfaction that we get when we shame someone, whether it's face to face or on social media or the internet. How do we take that and convert it into an actual investment in someone else's learning, redemption, and belonging? Kathy's book has huge implications for business, politics, social cohesion, and self-development. And I'm so excited for you to hear our conversation. But first, let's hear Kathy read a brief excerpt from her book. The shame machine. Here's Kathy.
My parents were both PhD mathematicians. Science and math were the ruling belief systems in our household. Whether it was the weather outside or human evolution, my parents believed inherently in the objectivity of facts. It was their religion. Naturally, they followed science, as they saw it, in their meticulous approach to dieting. They've kept a towering doctor's office scale in the bathroom and updated weight charts on graph paper, noting every pound lost, every pound gained. I'd watched this process for years. Now I was joining the effort. My goal was to lose two pounds a week. That translated into cutting my consumption by 1,000 calories per day. For a young nerd like me, this was exciting. Not only was I going to lose weight, I could use my math skills in the process.
We had a calorie counting book on a shelf in the kitchen. I looked up the value of everything I ate in it and then added it all up. By subtracting this sum from my quote unquote maintenance amount, I calculated how much more I could eat. My father explained that if I succeeded in limiting calories, I could reward myself at the end of the week with a candy bar of my choice. If I failed, I would lose my allowance that week. He wielded carrots and sticks to make sure I understood the urgency of the problem. At first I loved dieting. Each Saturday my mom weighed me on our special scale to check on my progress and determined whether I deserved punishment or reward. The scale had two beams, the big one for increments of fifty pounds, and the smaller for single pounds.
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